Warrior protection is a surprisingly good tree for damage. I realize this is mostly due to how warriors hold aggro, but the tree has a lot of damage talents.Vitality gives 10% more strength. Oh what am I saying, paladins have that too, in the holy tree for some reason. Madness if you ask me. But it's so shallow that it is easily grabbed by ret.Focused Rage is great. 3 less rage isn't a lot, but consider that a warrior's 'mana' bar is only 100 deep and abilities max out at around 30 rage; that's a 10% reduced cost. More common are 10 rage abilities, a 30% cost savings is pretty great. It's very inclusive when it says offensive abilities. Demo shout, shield bash, shield slam, thunderclap, whirlwind; they're all in there. On an unrelated note this makes revenge absurdly cheap at 2 rage.One-handed Specialization is the kind of talent that fury warriors would trade reproductive organs for. 10% more damage and unlike paladins they can DW, so using one-handed weapons isn't such a bad idea for DPS.Defiance: who doesn't love expertise?Devastate with imp Sudner Armor is very cheap: 9 rage. Spam that with a slow main hand and the damage is better than you'd expect.

Hybrids aren't impossible. The trick is to make specs work similarly enough that they can share stats. Paladins are awful at this, using almost entirely different stats for each spec. Even worse, with paladins there's nearly no benefit to off-spec roles. The lack of baseline DPS or tanking abilities is pretty awful.

Huh? How does a post about the warrior prot tree turn into yet another whine about the death of hybridism? When you start with a shaman back when tri-specs were popular and paladin PvP meant protection with a few points in the other trees, you tend to notice connections everywhere.